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This spring, France decided against a female president. (Apparently Égalité doesn't come before Fraternité.) But by the time summer rolls around, French cinema will reaffirm that the Gallic woman is mightier than ever—and worthy of worship. French directors continue to prove that exploring taboos is more exciting than Bruce Willis dodging bullets and the latest red-carpet minx dropping her top.
In the buddy flick with brains My Best Friend, Catherine (Julie Gayet) raises her perfectly arched eyebrows at the romantic ramblings of François (Daniel Auteuil of Caché). The duo play Parisian business partners in the antiques trade, and their relationship is strictly platonic. In fact, Catherine, who is just as attracted to women as François is, has concluded that all social contact is to him either commercial or coital—basically, he has no male friends. Pas vrai! François, who was born to bellyache, gets in a scrap with a cabbie named Bruno—and then, to prove Catherine wrong, tries to turn the tension around, forcing and then forging a real friendship. Meanwhile Catherine, with Gayet's generous but critical bearing, becomes more than a foil to Auteuil's cleverly manic bumblings; through pursed lips, she chides, and you hope she never stops.
Molière is a period drama—and those who dread hours of toiles and costume parties should be warned. This is a mash-up, in its way, of Dangerous Liaisons and Quills, imagining the decade or so in Molière's early adulthood during which historians aren't quite sure what the cash-strapped writer was doing or where he was doing it. In this satisfying account, the dramatist, played by Romain Duris, poses as a cleric who moves into the manse of a whiny aristocrat and moves in on his wife. The well-born doofus wants to learn acting in order to impress a possible mistress (Ludivine Sagnier), who deems him unimpressive. But Sagnier, with red ringlets against her alabaster cheeks, is anything but. You may recall her naughty soppiness in Swimming Pool, and here she has fewer scenes but holds forth with a canny cruelty as a tart princess who enjoys messing with her courtiers. Men in the audience will wish to wait in line, even for a scolding.
[Click here to watch the Molière trailer.]
In Lady Chatterley, there is far more kiss-kiss than tsk-tsk (actually, it's bang-bang). Marina Hands, who played the daughter-in-law in The Barbarian Invasions, is another gilded-cage denizen. This oddly plaintive post–World War I drama is set in England but spoken in French. As D.H. Lawrence's lovelorn lady of the manor, Hands spends the first half of the film dejected: Her husband's war wounds have dashed her hopes of starting a family, and her house is like an infirmary. Then she takes long walks in the woods that culminate in quickies with the estate's gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch). As the illicit love deepens—prepare for an eyeful of French raunch—the film builds toward an erotic romp in the rain that makes the naked lovers look like hippies at Esalen. Hands's transformation from uptight socialite to wood nymph is a natural wonder all its own.
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